Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer

Hello All,

I have now cleared my Second Google Cloud Certification - Associate Cloud Engineer

Its not easy as it seems to be for any newbie or those who are experienced. The questions are tricky like any other Google Cloud Certs and it requires good hands on Knowledge to clear.

Its a 2 hour exam with 50 questions. I had used the entire 2 hours with the exam actually timing out having reviewed the last question one more time.

This is my second remote exam and the experience is quite rewarding.

My Experience:

I do not have much hands-on working in GCP but my experience for the past 2 years as a GCP trainer in my current organisation helped me during the 2 hour exam.

1. I had my own preparation material that I have used during my training sessions which I reviewed before I started the preparation.
2. I went through Dan Sullivan's 5 hour Google Cloud Associate training video in Udemy. Though I know the concepts already, it was a good refresher for the Certification.
3. I did few labs of interest like App Engine, Anthos, Cloud Run in qwiklabs. The whole purpose of doing it to get familiar with any new features are added that might come in the exam.

Key concepts tested:

1. Organization hierarchy : Very important, as some of the questions were on the folder structure and its impact on IAM policy on the resources
2. IAM : A lot of questions were around service account permissions and role permissions. The questions were twisted and tricky and you need to read the question again to get the right answer
3. Storage : Choice of Cloud Storage and Cloud Database were tested. Tested when would you choose a particular storage and in which scenario, storage types and its impact on availability and cost. For eg: when would you choose cloud sql vs Spanner
4. Network: Tested on the types of VPC, Subnetting and about Firewall Rules. Tricky questions were around VPC peering and Shared VPC. Remember VPC Peering is across organization and shared VPC is only within an Organization.
5. Compute: In Kubernetes at a minimum you should know the difference between Deployment, Service and Nodes, In compute you need to understand the various type of VMs that could be created. Difference between App Engine types
6. Cost : Different cost options available in Google Cloud.

Please read through the Exam Guide before the exam and make sure you cover each section independently.

Dan Sullivan has done a good job in covering the exam topics, however you need to make sure you have enough hands-on via any labs or working experience to put your certification to real use.